This is a Spanish translation of a 2008 article by Daniel Rubinfeld, used at the Master's degree in Law and Economics, which should be read after handling concepts of chapters XXII-XXVI of Derecho y EconomÃ­a - Lecturas de Grandes Contribuciones. It surveys econometrics methods that are used to evaluate antitrust issues relating to merger analysis, liability, impact, and damages. The article first describes a number of applications for traditional statistical methods that rely on reduced form estimation using cross-section or time-series data. It then examines the application of methods that uncover the structure of demand, including (1) the estimation of demand elasticities using market transactions data; (2) the use of transactions or bidding data, perhaps merged with information on buyer characteristics, to learn about the structure of preferences and to make inferences about the extent of buyer substitution between alternatives; and (3) the use of survey techniques. The article then raises a number of important conceptual issues that are relevant with respect to questions of liability, impact, and damages. JEL codes: K21 (Antitrust Law).

We have expanded the treatment of the econometric calculation of the elasticity of demand, adding additional ideas on the identification problem and explaining how to obtain the reduced form analysis based on the structural form in an appendix.